Tuesday, April 9, 2013

H. A. Goodman - Breaking the Devil's Heart

After reading and reviewing enough books, most reviewers, I
think, start to have a general idea of how novels fail. Generally, the problem
is not gaping flaws. Most of the time, it’s just that they don’t do much at
all. Most mediocre books are perfectly competent but provide no reason to
bother with them. Breaking the Devil’s Heart is nothing like that. Goodman
has great ideas. Alas, those ideas are frequently let down by a kind of clumsy
yet pedantic over-eagerness.

Stewart is an Observer, a man between Heaven and Hell that
has given his (after)life to attempting to destroy Satan. His life before death
prepared him well for all this. Working for the CIA, he was tasked to Find the root of evil and learn ways to
destroy this impulse within mankind (p. 10). Already, you can likely see
many of the novel’s strengths and weaknesses. Goodman is not a boring or easily
contended writer. He finds the biggest issues that he can, levels his lance at
them, and charges. Best of all, he actually has some interesting things to say
about them.

But those issues are so large that he also has to squash
them to fit, and his campaign against them frequently becomes so optimistic and
(morally) good that it loses all believability. The CIA deciding to eradicate
evil so that America’s enemies won’t be so depraved as to attack it is, for
instance, a bit like a high school student setting out to cure cancer to
improve his college application. Solving all of humanity’s problems in order to
protect America’s borders is nice on a few levels, but it seems to be swapping
about what really matters.

The novel operates at the midway point between a thriller
and a philosophical exploration of evil. Bizarrely enough, the contrast works.
Stewart and his love interest, Layla, bluff their way onto a tour through hell
and explore Heaven too, seeing throughout different scenes from Earth that
explain or get at different facets of evil. The general ballsiness of the whole
venture keeps the different example-type scenes interesting and actually manages
to build a fair bit of narrative momentum. Goodman also does look at a pretty
admirable slice of history in his work.

Looking at the scenes and discussions of morality
themselves, though, problems begin to appear. First, Stewart is a white
American guy and approaches problems accordingly. Now, I am not the most Social
Justice-conscious review out there. For the most part, I don’t feel
particularly qualified to delve into such issues and back off unless they are
particularly egregious. But Goodman has set his sights on exactly this kind of
stuff, so not engaging with him on it would feel like shying away from problems
that are in the book’s core.

Americans are the angels. I mean that figuratively and
literally. To a greater and lesser extent, Goodman does too. Both Stewart and
Layla are from the US, and Stewart’s go to comparison for Heaven’s struggle
with Hell is how America fought the Soviets. When demons refer to the angels as
you Americans (p. 64), it is true
that Steward and Layla are Americans. But every other angel we meet is from the States as well. It’s only the force of hell that don’t all come from the
Atlantic’s western shore.

The choice of moral examples and exemplars reflect this to
an uncomfortable degree. The first scene of evil that we are shown is an
Islamic honor killing. Far later, we do turn to America. But we only partially
do so to find Horrors. Stewart goes to see the Freedom Riders as they are
beaten in order to witness the heroism needed to stand up to oppressive
systems. This leaves us with a historic example of American evil – and the
heroes that stood up to it and, at least within the novel’s confines, abolished
it. Foreign evils, alas, are still going on and don’t seem to have the
necessary heroes to stop them without Stewart’s intervention. To add the
discomforting cherry on top, the Freedom Rider that Stewart chooses as his hero
to emulate is white.

The broader problem with Stewart’s quest to eradicate evil
is that evil is rather built into Earth. Goodman realizes this and, every once
in a while, his characters brush up against the limits of their quest. Before
long, they have admitted that Hell is not responsible for all the evil in the
world (which seems to leave Satan as sort of superfluous, but okay). But
setting out to destroy something within humanity has some ethical
considerations that go along with it. One of Goodman’s snazzier ideas is that
God is just as allusive in the afterlife as in reality. Addressing that,
Stewart says: I longed for some eternal
referee to come down and actually fix things instead of standing behind the
notion of free will as if it were a concrete barrier blocking him from reality (p.
344). That comes in the third to last paragraph, and it is only then that
Stewart admits that he is butting up against free will and arguably the core of
humanity in his quest. Alas, his moral exploration ends there, before he can
start to question just what removing free will for goodness’ sake would mean.

But what do we mean by goodness? If Stewart is going to add
an extra dose of conscience to humanity, cut back on this whole free will
thing, and set us on the path of righteousness, it seems like we should have a
path of righteousness planned out. But we don’t seem to. For a book that spends
so much time exploring evil, Breaking the
Devil’s Heart leaves good remarkably untouched, as if it were an obvious
matter that we all agreed on long ago.

This can be seen in Heaven where, in the absence of good, we
are told that fundementalists of all faiths have taken matters into their own
hands. In their own words: Our heaven is
based on holy books, every single holy book ever written (p. 303). Now,
mind you, we are in heaven. Everyone living under this fundamentalist regime is
already good in the sense that they have not, say, murdered anyone. Which means
that the new Heavenly order the fundamentalists are imposing has to do not with
the few universal religious diktats but with the more peripheral stuff. Only,
all of that peripheral stuff seems like it would be an area of some
disagreement. How have Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, etc. fundamentalists
agreed on the Sabbath’s particulars, again? From the brief glimpse that we get,
it seems like the answer is that they became the US Bible Belt.

That brings us back to the broader question of good. If all
of mankind is going to be made good, it seems dangerously possible, given the
aforementioned USA! traits of Stewart, that the world will be made into
America. The Islamic honor killing that I described a while back is described
as the consequence of tribalism and
cultural norms (p. 27), a description that is not inaccurate but does seem
to place us in the strange place where cultural norms can lead to violence –
except in America, where we have all of that solved. Referring to positive
consequences of culture, Stewart says: There
aren’t many unintended consequences from a Thanksgiving Dinner or opening
presents on Christmas Eve (p. 112). Negative cultures are found in the
Middle East and lead to murder. Benevolent cultures like America’s have nice
holidays – at least one of which is amusingly enough intricately tied to the
whole genocide-through-disease founding of the nation.

Nonetheless, the darker side of Stewart’s morality was not
my main problem with Breaking the Devil’s
Heart. Stewart often expresses his views in debates, and his demonic
opponents do get to smack him down a fair few refreshing times. Odds are, those
demons are not the characters closest to Goodman’s heart. Still, their retorts
are included and are often not only cutting but certainly more insightful than
Stewart’s own arguments, at least in this reviewer’s opinion.

No, Goodman’s real problem is prose. At his best, his
writing fades into the background or elicits a chuckle or two. But sentences so
shambling that calling them clunkers seems merciful abound: Upon hearing the Boss’s surprising
evaluation of his personality, the bitterness within Ted was so palpable that I
pulled Layla back several feet for fear of him venting his fury in some violent
manner (p. 100). First, it’s interesting that Layla, a badass Observer in
her own right, would not be capable of stepping backwards on her own if the
need arose. But more pertinently here, there is not a single clause in there
that could not be more concisely stated. In moments like this, Goodman manages
to both exclusively tell rather than show and to also be extremely vague.
Besides which, grammatically, it was “the bitterness within Ted” that was doing
the listening, not Stewart.

Let’s look at another: Too
often, men and women experience the world, as well as each other, in disparate
ways because of societal norms and other aspects of human life (p. 71). The
first half – people experience things differently – is a truism. The second
half, which seems poised to expand upon it, starts off fine by going into
“societal norms” (an area that, as we’ve seen, Goodman continually approaches
but then shies away from) but then ventures off into territory so bland and
nonspecific as to be utterly meaningless. “Other aspects of human life” could
include, quite literally, anything at all.

At other times, the prose is not so much bad as it is simply
strange. In case the reader is utterly unfamiliar with human interaction,
Goodman defines what “thanks” means: “Thanks,
babe,” I [said], wanting her to know I appreciated her gesture immensely
(p. 146). Elsewhere, Goodman uses allusions. Most of these actually work quite
well, such as a description of Hell as “Dante’s
Inferno meets Boiler Room” (p.
98). After having a character quote Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” though,
Goodman helpfully outlines the purpose of an allusion, just in case someone in
the back row had thought such quotations might be chosen entirely at random: The beauty of using this stanza of Poe’s “The
Raven” was that it actually described our current precarious circumstance (p.
159). And it’s not only the reader that is assumed to be dumber than a brick.
At one point, Stewart explains to Layla that “We’ve been in a serious, committed relationship for several years
now,” (p. 75) something that you would really hope she would be capable of
remembering on her own.

You could describe Breaking
the Devil’s Heart as a novel that bit off more than it could chew. That’s
not quite accurate, though. Goodman’s philosophy is problematic but also large
and daring enough to be engaged with. That could sound like damning with faint
praise, but I don’t mean it that way. Goodman advances into territory that few
dare to, and the demons’ comments give me hope that he has enough
self-awareness to correct (most of) his problems in future novels in the
setting. The prose does not seem as easily correctable. The novel’s ideas are
not flawless but are still impressive, but the writing proves a barrier that
ends up casting the whole venture into doubt.

1 comment:

“Evil is a lack of goodness. It is goodness spoiled. You can have good without evil, but you cannot have evil without good.” - J P Moreland.

ie Evil is a lack of Godliness.

I suspect you may be reading more into Goodman's "philosophy" than is actually there. The classical Christian definition of evil would be Moreland's but the practical implementation seems to be fairly variable.

Throughout most of history the Christian Church has been engaged in what we now consider acts of evil. But what we as a society consider evil isn't a biblical absence of God, we're just making it up as we go along. Burning heretics? Evil. Abortion? Merely a woman's right to choose.

...Who?

I spend my free time reading and writing. In addition to assorted other content, I'll be posting a book review every Tuesday. I have also published a fair few stories, a complete list of which can be found here. If you want to get in contact with me for any reason, feel free to email me at nskteh[at]gmail[dot]com.